Google Launches My Google, World Does Not End
wingedpig.com - Mark Fletcher, CEO of Bloglines: Google Launches My Google, World Does Not End
My Yahoogle doesn’t track what information you’ve already read, and what bits are new. So, each time you visit your My Yahoogle page, it takes time to scan the page to see if there’s new information. This is a complete waste. If you only show new things, the amount of information that needs to be displayed decreases greatly. There’s less information, and it’s all new. It’s a much more efficient way of dealing with many information sources.
Another flaw in the My Yahoogle model is the idea of placing everything on one page. Besides forcing the user to become a web page designer (should I place this information source in the right corner, or left?), this again reduces the number of information sources that can be followed, to a number that can be reasonably placed on a single web page.
The Bloglines user interface was developed partially in response to these flaws. Only show new articles. Provide a mechanism (the tree display in the left pane) that allows you to easily select a subset of information sources to display at any one time.
I have over 200 subscriptions in my Bloglines account (many of which you can see in my blogroll on the left). There’s no way I could follow that many sites in My Yahoogle.
Now, granted Mark Fletcher is probably more than a little biased, but in this case, I agree with him.
I also have slightly over 200 subscriptions (after cutting it down from 311) in my BlogLines account. I tried using My Yahoo for a while (since I’d been using it for weather, email, calendar, fantasy basketball) to read RSS feeds, but once you get past about 10-15 feeds, it becomes unmanageable. Even if you separate out categories onto different pages.
I use Gmail, so I thought that maybe My Google would be good for that, but I already have the Gmail plugin for Firefox, so really it doesn’t help that much… not to mention that AirSet has a new version of their web app available (since yesterday). Airset is my new (one and only) homepage. (I used to have Bloglines and Gmail as other home pages - since you can have multiple home pages in Firefox), but that was WAY too distracting from actually Getting Things Done.
